Nixon - Raspberry Pi Blueprints

Dan Nixon lives in England and is a 20-year old software engineering student who is currently studying at Newcastle University and is in his third year. He has long had an interest in electronics and embedded computing projects.

Previously, Dan has worked on a 360-degree camera system for the Raspberry Pi and this is where his interest in the platform started.

Currently, he is on a year-long work placement and is working on neutron data analysis software at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxford, UK.

I would like to thank my mother and father for their support while writing this book. I would also like to thank the members of Maker Space, Newcastle, for providing the facilities to prototype the projects and allowing me to use some of their projects in this book.

Soumen Chandra Laha has been working as a senior embedded design engineer at Wine Yard Technologies since 2008. He started his career as a quality control engineer and gradually became an embedded design engineer. He has been working in the field of embedded systems and has industry experience of more than 6 years in various domains, including automotive, consumer electronics, healthcare, and so on. He has hands-on experience in various microcontrollers and microprocessors, such as 8051, PIC, AVR, PSoC, ARM Cortex, ARM7, ARM9, ARM11, and the TI-DSP microcontroller. He has development exposure to embedded Linux and Windows CE and knows how to port real-time operating systems on various ARM platforms.

He is an electronic hobbyist and designer and believes in continuous learning. His strengths lie in developing, maintaining, integrating, and debugging large sized C code of applications and system-level embedded software designs.

Maryala Srinivas is the founder and managing director of Wine Yard Technologies, which was founded in 2006. He has over 10 years of experience in the field of advanced embedded systems design and development. He is a passionate and enthusiastic entrepreneur. His passion to become an entrepreneur made him reject a great job offer from Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (DMRC), where he was to work for the signaling department in the R&D Division. He is associated with Junior Chamber International, India and Hyderabad Directors/CEO's Forum (HDCF). He received the Indira Gandhi Sadbhavana Award in 2012 for outstanding services, achievements, and contributions to the nation in the field of science and technology.

Many of his articles are published in national and international journals and technical magazines. He has addressed several technical conferences and seminars in the field of embedded systems and RTOS design. He was recognized as the star speaker at EFY Design Engineers' Conference, held at New Delhi in March 2012. Many of the faculty members from universities such as NITs, JNTU, AU, and OU and other private engineering colleges benefited immensely by the technology talent transformation workshops conducted by him at Wine Yard Technologies. The Wine Yard team led by him has achieved many milestones. More than 100,000 students and over 400 professionals, including the teaching faculty from universities and many working engineers, have immensely benefited from the talent transformation programs.

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Preface

The Raspberry Pi is a small form factor, single board, ARM-based computer. It is capable of running on many desktop applications that can be run on a standard Linux computer. While the Pi is only slightly larger than a credit card, it uses very little power. As such, it has become very popular among the hacker and maker community, which uses the Pi to integrate more computing power in their projects.

The Pi is very easy to set up and in less than 20 minutes, you can run it on a modified version of popular, Linux-based operating systems. It will function just like you would expect a desktop PC to. Thanks to its small form factor, many people have used it as an alternative to a traditional PC for fast access to applications and the Internet. Since the Pi draws very little power, it can be left running.

Where the Pi really excels is that it brings more computing power to hardware and electronics projects. This is made possible by a wide range of interfaces on the Pi that are typically not found on conventional computers.